A WaPo review of 'Breach of Trust : How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country’ by Andrew J. Bacevich:http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...cd6_story.html

I do like this phrase for describing (US) All Volunteer Forces:
....a civil-military relationship founded on the principle that a few fight while the rest watch.
The reviewer's best passage:
Evading civic responsibility is the order of the day, replaced by a politics of insult, enmity and evasion. The men and women we so blithely send off to fight wars in places we’ve never heard of deserve better than that, but there’s no reason to believe we’re going to give it to them.
Whilst I appreciate the book is about the USA, the principles have an application in Western Europe, where conscription has dwindled, but I cannot recall any public debate about an all volunteer military except on the far left.